Martin Jacques was editor of Marxism Today until its closure in 1991. He is co-founder of the think-tank Demos. He has been a columnist for The Times and The Sunday Times and was deputy editor of The Independent. He is the co-editor and co-author of ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ (1981), ‘The Politics of Thatcherism’ (1983) and ‘New Times’ (1989). Currently he is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. During the last year he has been a visiting professor at the International Centre for Chinese Studies at Aichi University in Japan, a visiting professor at Renmin University in Beijing and a senior visiting fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He is writing a book about Asian modernity and the rise of China. He is a columnist for The Guardian and The New Statesman … (full text).

… (He) assert that Prime Minister Tony Blair is presently “the only show in town”, because “there is no serious, ideologically based opposition to Blair within the party” … (full text, 15 December 2004).

… Was the defeat inevitable? This, of course, was not the only defeat that the trade union movement suffered during the Thatcher period, but it was by far the most serious. If the miners had enjoyed unity, then not only would the strike have been more effective, but they would also have enjoyed much broader public support. This would have made it harder for the Thatcher government to be so ruthless and uncompromising in its conduct of the strike. They would have been obliged to find ways of convincing the middle ground … (full text, 6 March 2009);

… This report identifies a new breed of scientist inhabiting the world’s science and innovation networks, and argues that the UK should embrace them … (full text, March 4, 2009 – and: download of the 100 pages-pdf text);

… The financial crisis that is now wreaking havoc all over the western world, however, tells a very different story. The Thatcherite world is unravelling before our eyes. Its beloved City has been damned in the minds of most, as the shock troops of the neoliberal revolution, the bankers, have become the object of enormous popular anger. The market, the white knight of Thatcherism, has failed in the most spectacular way imaginable. The state is universally seen as indispensable to any solution. In the United States, which for Thatcher was always the compelling model, the new president appears to be on the verge of nationalising the banks; it cannot be long before the same thing happens here. Nationalisation, the state as saviour, the failure of the market, the demise of the City, the rise of protectionism, the decline of the US: on the 30th anniversary of Thatcher’s rise to power, we are witnessing nothing less than the implosion of the Thatcherite project. Its system and credo have landed the country in its greatest economic crisis for 60 years, perhaps much longer. That she led a party wedded to the status quo, to the preservation of Britain as it was, made her Bolshevism even more unlikely. But just as it took a long time for people to understand the significance and meaning of her rise in the 1970s and early 1980s, so now it is as if the country is in a state of shock, unable even vaguely to comprehend the ramifications of what is happening … (full text, 26 February 2009);

… In all these senses the financial meltdown has far more in common with the Great Depression than the Great Inflation. When the financial crisis consumed Wall Street in 1929 and proceeded to undermine the real economy, engulfing Europe in the process, it was not accompanied by a radical shift towards Keynesianism, but rather a reassertion of sound finance orthodoxy, followed in due course by the adoption of protectionism. The political mainstream as represented by Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden and the Conservative Stanley Baldwin all sang from the same hymn sheet. Only Keynes and a faction of the Liberal Party enunciated a plausible alternative. Eventually a programme of fiscal deficits and public works was pursued by Franklin D Roosevelt in the United States, but in Britain Keynesianism was not properly embraced until rearmament and the approach of war. Indeed, it was not until 1945 that the combined legacy of war and the Depression belatedly resulted in a fundamental political realignment and the birth of the social democratic era. (full text, Feb 18, 2009);

A round-up of some of the highlights from this week’s New Statesman plus some of the things we’re up to online. We launch our brand new columnist Martin Jacques – the former editor of that legendary publication Marxism Today. Don’t miss his fascinating essay on the financial collapse – and you can learn more about him online through our Q&A. (on NewStatesman, 13 February 2009);

… The left is very fragmented and does not have a strong sense of itself anymore. It’s much more polycentric than it used to be. I suppose that has advantages but there are also a lot of disadvantages. This is a situation in which an inchoate shift to the left is taking place – popular opinion has turned on the citadels of neo-liberalism, chiefly the banks. There’s a turn against the gross inequalities and gross privilege that have characterised the neo-liberal era. Furthermore, there’s an almost universal belief that there’s only one body that can sort this out and that’s the government. That’s a fundamental shift because for over thirty years people have believed the opposite: that government is ineffectual, even obsolescent, while the market and private enterprise are dynamic and operate in the public interest. They don’t think that now. The striking thing, however, is that the left has had precious little to do with this shift – it’s not like the 1970s when the old system ran out of steam and was undermined by the rise of Thatcherism. The whole thing has imploded but not thanks to the left … (full text, 13 February 2009);

A Constitution for Social Care sets out a fair settlement between social care users and society. Social care is an essential public service. It provides day to day support for disabled people, those with impairments, and older people who need help maintaining their independence and living full and active lives. At the moment, it helps support over 1.5 million people, and it is a fundamental element of our welfare system … (full text on the webpage, Feb 4, 2009 – and: download of the 13 pages-pdf text);

… The timidity of this government, its inability to face up to the size of the crisis and its refusal to take on those who are responsible for it is revealed, above all else, in its failure to nationalise the high street banks. The government will pay dearly for this. Sooner or later, one suspects this will be inevitable and the government will look weak because it has resisted it for so long. The fact that it has given such huge quantities of public money to the banks without any effective controls or transparency – that it has socialised the risks while allowing those responsible for the calamity to dispense public money as they see fit, running the banks according to their own and their shareholders’ interests – leaves it condemned as having subsidised the very people who caused the disaster in the first place. New Labour was always spineless in the face of powerful vested interests; and even when the neoliberal system has come tumbling down, it remains as weak-kneed as ever … (full text, 29 January 2009);

… The central player in this new world will be China. Continental in size and mentality, China is a ‘civilisation-state’ whose characteristics, attitudes and values long predate its existence as a nation-state. Although clearly influenced by the west, its extraordinary size and history mean that it will remain highly distinct, and as it exercises its rapidly growing power it will change much more than the world’s geo-politics. The nation-state as we understand it will no longer be globally dominant, and the Westphalian state-system will be transformed; ideas of race will be redrawn. This profound and far-sighted book explains for the first time the deeper meaning of the rise of China … (full text).

We are but halfway through 2008 yet it has already born witness to a sizeable shift in global power. The default western mindset remains that the western writ rules. That is hardly surprising; it has been true for so long there has been little reason for anyone to question it, least of all the west. The assumption is that might and right are invariably on its side, that it always knows best and that if necessary it will enforce its political wisdom and moral rectitude on others. There is, however, a hitch: the authority of the self-appointed global sheriff is remorselessly eroding … (full text, 30 July 2008);

… The political terrain is shifting. Attitudes towards the US are a case in point. The move towards neoliberalism in Britain was intimately bound up with the embrace of the US as the country to be aped and copied. The American model was celebrated by Thatcherites and New Labour alike, California worshipped as the model of the future, “Anglo-Saxon” embalmed as the fitting metaphor for the shared Anglo-American legacy, Europe denigrated and the rest of the world ignored. How perceptions of the US have changed: a country living beyond its means, dependent on large helpings of Asian credit, characterised by huge inequalities, its great financial institutions guilty of huge folly, forced to rely for their salvation on the sovereign wealth funds of China and elsewhere. And, remember, we are only at the very beginning of the biggest geopolitical shift since the dawn of the industrial era … (full text, 18 February 2008).